Radical Judaism_ Rethinking God and Tradition - Arthur Green [47]
Reflection on intellectual honesty and its role in articulating a contemporary theology requires another few steps. As I said at the outset of our journey together, my own naive faith was challenged by critical study of Jewish sources as well as by personal struggles around questions of providence and theodicy. In the coming discussion of Torah I make no literalist assumptions about the historicity of the text or its revealed origins. I speak out of deep relationship with the Torah text as we have it, out of unceasing engagement (including moments of outrage and frustration), but not as a believer in it as resulting from divine dictation. The biblical scholar's understanding of the text's complex origins and editing are a level of truth that I recognize as valid. In my religious life, however, I continue to embrace the text as a whole, as sacred artifact rather than as historical document. I enter into the text as a participant in an unending conversation among generations of Jews, enriched but essentially unfazed by critical perspectives. I recognize this as a postmodern perspective. I rejoice in my renewed freedom to be a living participant in the hearing, articulation, and constant reinterpretation of Torah that has been the creative lifeblood of our tradition for many centuries. Liberated from modernity's insistence both on the literal truth/untruth test (Spinoza's legacy) and on the demand for critical distance, I am able to reenter the stream of tradition uncrippled by the sense of detachment and alienation that stood as modernity's hallmark.
I have been able to make the leap from modernity to postmodernity across the bridge of a mystical faith, one that roots itself unabashedly in the ground of collective human inner experience and in the assumption that the mind can stretch to embrace realms of consciousness and reality beyond those ordinarily considered, even in philosophical discussions. The ability to transcend the ego-self (and hence to escape the prison of self-consciousness that so characterizes modernity), to accept the coincidence of opposites, and to glimpse realities that cannot be expressed in ordinary language are all widely attested in the teachings of mystical masters throughout the world, including our Jewish sources. In placing my own feeble moments of mystical insight in the context of these, I find myself liberated to enter fully into the serious and committed gamesmanship of talmud torah, or to respond positively to the invitation of the Ba'al Shem Tov to “enter, you and all your household, into the word” (a reading of Genesis 7:1). Everything I say below should be understood in this spirit.
What Is Torah?
Torah means “teaching.” The word is found numerous times in the text of the work we call the Torah, referring to various specific teachings (“This is the teaching of the sin-offering” [Lev. 7:2], and so on) or to groups of teachings given to Israel on a particular occasion. It can be used in the broadest sense in the world; any teaching, instruction, doctrine can be referred to as torah, a term that in itself contains no judgment as to truth or legitimacy of content. In modern secularized Hebrew it is used in just that way. A Hebrew book about “the documentary hypothesis” regarding the Pentateuch was called Torat ha-Te'udot (literally, “the Torah of the Documents”), with no irony intended. In classical Jewish parlance, torah retains a more specifically religious meaning. “If they tell you ‘There is wisdom to be found among the nations,’ believe them. But if they say ‘There is Torah to be found among them,’ do not believe.”5 Torah in this old rabbinic epigram is distinguished from hokhmah, the more neutral and universal “wisdom,” which the nations do possess. It is specifically Jewish teaching, whose source, unlike mere human wisdom, lies in divine